Your brain on music

I’m still slogging my way through Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music, a tough, overly-scientific (for me) read. Levitin is a recording engineer and rock musician turned neuroscientist. There’s a lot about neurons and ganglia and parts of the brain. For many chapters I’ve been thinking, this is interesting, but so what. Finally I got to an “oh, that’s what!” moment.

It seems that, for neuron-ganglia reasons scientists can demonstrate, we need a “schema,” or structure, to help us understand music (and everything else). We develop these structures by exposure to kinds of music during our lives. The schema helps us understand what we are hearing, predict in a general way how a piece or a melody will proceed (eg., G7 goes to C and “ti” goes to “do”), and feel comfortable with it. Composers (classical, rock, jazz…) rely on these predictions to surprise us at times, and we are delighted, except when the surprise falls outside the schema, and then we don’t quite get it. We “get” Mahler after we’ve known Brahms, but we don’t quite get Schoenberg and his lack of scales and chords and keys; it’s too far outside our schema.

Now that’s all interesting, I suppose, but so what? The “aha” moment for me is this: When listening to styles of music we don’t know well or understand, if we don’t have at least some structure on which to hang our musical hat, it’s too far outside our understanding to appreciate. Levitin gives the example of Latin music and its rhythmic complexity. It all sounds like Latin music to me, with a strong beat. But I can’t easily distinguish among bossa nova, samba, rhumba, beguine, mambo, merengue and tango, which he says are all “completely distinct and identifiable” styles of music, with distinct rhythmic patterns. “I have found that if I teach one or two Latin rhythms to listeners, they come to appreciate them; it is all a question of having…a schema.” (This is on page 241, which shows you how much I’ve had to wade through! Not for the faint of heart, this book, though I hear the sequel is easier.)

This explains to me in a direct way that apparently I never thought about before why a Mozart symphony or the B Minor Mass might not interest some listeners. They don’t “get it” because they have no schema to hang their hat on. But if we first could explain to them what to listen for (the structure we in the business take for granted), they can begin to appreciate it. Maybe pre-concert talks and family concerts and clear program notes are more important than we thought! Anyone can understand that, in that Mozart symphony, there are two themes in the opening section, that in the middle the themes are played around with, and that they then come back in the third section. Suddenly we have a schema.

Levitin describes how in a jazz piece each section improvises on a tune in a very formal way, something I’ve never heard or understood, and suggests that the listener without a schema keep humming the tune every time a new section takes over the improv, just as he says that learning a few Latin rhythms will help us understand that music. If I can be taught to distinguish a samba from a mambo, or recognize what the saxes are doing, then I can probably teach someone what’s going on in the B Minor Mass.

Like learning languages, we’ll never be “fluent” in these foreign styles of music if we come to them late in life, but at least we can understand and appreciate them.

One Response

I heard Deke Sharon (of the Contemporary A Cappella Society of America) use a nice metaphor to express this idea at a festival hosted by the Barbershop Harmony Society back in 2001. It was in response to a barbershopper who complained about the Housejacks’ performance the night before that he hadn’t heard a single tune all evening. Deke said that it was probably like eating Thai food for the first time: all you notice is the heat from the spices, because that’s what’s most different from what you’re used to. Likewise if that barbershopper had never heard contemporary a cappella before, all he’d hear at first is the beat, because that’s what’s most different from what he was used to. But if you take the time to explore the new experience (and, yes, learn about its conventions and typical ways of doing things) you discover that Thai food is varied and interesting, and that contemporary a cappella does indeed have tunes.

The challenge of course is keeping someone’s attention long enough to help them build their schemas!